Streaming

You do not need to download a mp4 file to watch it with omxplayer. If you have the URL of a (h264) rtmp:// stream, just stream it with:

omxplayer rtmp://...

To stream a (h264) rtmpt://... URL with omxplayer just change the head rtmpt:// to rtmp://

Troubleshooting

Black screen after playback

If you get a black screen on your X11 Desktop after omxplayer is finished, you can use this command to restore your view:

xrefresh -display :0

Or you can use a small bash script for video playback to do this every time:

#/bin/bash
omxplayer "$@"
xrefresh -display :0

On raspian xrefresh is part of the x11-xserver-utils package
(apt-get install x11-xserver-utils)

No rights to VCHIQ

On bare installations of the default distributions Omxplayer often has insufficient permissions to access /dev/vchiq. One solution would be to run omxplayer as root, but a nicer solution is to add a udev rule so that /dev/vchiq is also accessible from other users. To accomplish this, do the following under root: